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Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

theguardian.com

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Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#471

Post by theshrike79 »

blt wrote: post #433
modeless wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just plug in, no card. The car identifies itself. It needs an internet connection to report the usage so it can be charged to the correct account. Gas stations obviously need a network connection of some kind too for card swipes to work. Otherwise you'd have to fall back to cash or manually writing down card numbers (is that even allowed anymore?) Almost all Superchargers are unmanned so no cash.

They could store the transactions in local memory until the connection is restored.

Would they store all of the valid credit card numbers in the world in local memory too? =)

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#472

Post by theshrike79 »

twblalock wrote: post #329
turtlebits wrote: post #178

Mass adoption won't happen until charging infrastructure improves dramatically. As a non-Tesla owner, I have had the worst experiences at fast charging stations - I'd say 70% of the time at Electrify America stations (they have the most fast charging coverage), I run into a charger that doesn't work and waste time moving my car and retrying another bay. (I've even experienced a station with 5 bays where none of them…

I remember in Thanksgiving 2019 that Tesla owners were sometimes waiting in line for hours at Supercharger stations in California -- and California has a lot of those! Even Tesla doesn't have it figured out during peak travel times.

You can't build for peak traffic, not in software nor in hardware.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#473

Post by theshrike79 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #102
ajross wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the number of high-speed chargers are tiny (think a couple of locations per large city) That's not so far off. Even large cities in North America have no more than a few dozen gas stations (and the UK likely fewer still due to things like London's congestion pricing reducing vehicle count). Once-a-week-or-so fueling doesn't really require a huge amount of infrastructure. That's one of the reasons we're all addicted…

>> And charging stations are, of course, absolutely dirt cheap to build relative to fuel stations. Really? A normal gas station can handle around 100 cars per hour using a handful of pumps and is refueled by daily deliveries from a big truck. Simple. An electric charge point capable of that will require a massive amount of electricity, electricity delivered over wires. Look into how much it costs to run such a servic…

For a gas station you need permits to place cubic meters of flammable poisonous liquids underground.

For a charging station you need: electricity. And not even huge amounts of it unless you're planning on building a huge charging field with dozens of high-power chargers (300kW+). Even then you can load balance the power with 90's technology to keep up. For peak loads you can have a battery on-site, charged on off-peak hours.

And none of this requires hazardous materials permits or safeties for flammable liquids.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#474

Post by theshrike79 »

akiselev wrote: post #165
BurningFrog wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, every parking spot could be a simple charging station. All you need is a power cable. Reusing the land of all gas stations for other things will be a good benefit of all this. Except for San Francisco, where they all will be preserved as historical landmarks.

> Yeah, every parking spot could be a simple charging station. All you need is a power cable. ...and the infrastructure to distribute the electricity. Back of the napkin math with the mall of America: 5.6 million sq ft at ~14kWh/sq ft per year (rough average estimate of all retail buildings) [1] equates to about 78.4 million kWh/year or 784,000 100kWh Model S's charged to full or 7.84 million charged 10% assuming 100…

Every parking space doesn't need to have the capacity to fill up a Model S from 1% to 100% during a lunch break.

What us civilized people here in the EU do, is we have 11-22kW charging points in pretty much all malls and supermarkets. You drive there, plug in your car, swipe the RFID and go shopping. You come back and your car has charged a bit.

No, it's not at a 100%, but it still has more charge than it did when you came in.

And again, load-balancing electricity is REALLY old tech. It's completely trivial to balance the load among the whole field during Christmas shopping season with every charger occupied so that everyone gets some charge, but the transformers don't explode.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#475

Post by theshrike79 »

jussij wrote: post #148
fiftyfifty wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false dichotomy, we have to get away from thinking of charging stations like gas pumps. Charging stations can be everywhere: grocery stores, retail stores, office buildings, malls, just about any parking lot or parking garage, hotels, airport parking and on and on. Gas pumps have to have huge underground tanks, and they have to be regularly refilled by large tanker trucks, by their very nature they will be…

I also think from the driver's perspective the usage will be totally different. Today's driver generally goes to the gas station only when the tank is empty. That leads to a 'big bang' event in that the tank will be close to empty at the start of the visit and full by the end of the visit. By comparison the driver of the electric car will be using a 'top up' approach, charging the car at home over night, at work when…

"Big bangs" only occur when you're traveling somewhere, for regular everyday driving around your home town, you never use a fast charger.

Trickle charging here and there and maybe some at home overnight from a normal wall socket is enough.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#476

Post by theshrike79 »

athms wrote: post #230
zizee wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent points. Also people seem to be forgetting a large percentage of people will be charging at home overnight, and will largely never need to charge their cars at places other than home.

Maybe for people that live in the suburbs and have disposable income to put in a charging station.

You don't need a "charging station", you need a wall plug that can handle 8A current without melting. In Finland we have one of those for most private parking spaces for car block heaters.

If you want something fancier, it's 300-1000€ for a "proper" charging station with a Type2 cable. If you've already bought an electric car, it'll pay itself back in a few months just with fuel costs. (EU prices, American fuel prices are just bonkers-cheap).

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#477

Post by whatever1 »

erikrothoff wrote: post #469
whatever1 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take Madrid as an example of a typical densely populated euro-city. ~ 3M population, half a million registered cars. I really don't see it economically, environmentally, or even technically viable to install a quarter million chargers to fix the battery charging problem.

Why would a quarter of a million chargers be needed? Seems really excessive.

Because every car needs to charge 1-2 times per week and you also don't want to park 10 blocks away from home. Maybe 50% coverage is indeed excessive, but it is correct ballpark estimate. Maybe you can get away with 20-30% in cities with less lazy (and more coordinated) people :)

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#478

Post by lostlogin »

TheSmiddy wrote: post #289
jiggawatts wrote: post #246

My problem is renting apartments. If you ask the strata or the building managers about charging points in the carpark, they look at you like you're speaking Klingon. This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries. Heck, I just walked past three Teslas in my building's car park, one of which is new and wasn't there last week! Do people... not plan ahead…

I'm in China where everybody rides ebikes and my building has a free for all parking space where 2/3rds of the parks have no chargers and the spots with charge ports all have qr codes you scan and pay with wechat to turn the port on. This is an easy problem to solve.

It sounds good - but the dark side of wechat and social credit lurks in the back of my mind. That is not an easy problem to solve.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#479

Post by xbmcuser »

whatever1 wrote: post #427

EVs currently have high enough utility in the wealthy suburbia where you own your garage and have the capability to charge overnight. If you are a euro-peasant living in a third floor apartment, street parking and commuting to work, then an EV has very little utility to offer. You cannot expect that people will go on a regular basis to charge stations and spend an hour to charge their car. You cannot also have a reas…

I disagree charging points should be introduced at work place parking rather than home. In the day time we have a lot of excess electricity available from solar where as at night gas and coal plants are used. If everyone starts charging at home more coal and gas plants will be needed to be built which will result in higher electricity prices for everyone as capacity payment parts of the electricity bills increase. Majority of cars are parked in parking spots at work between 9am to 5pm just like they are parked at home for 10-11pm to 7-8am at home. Electricity from solar is still getting cheaper by 15-20% a year most of us don't see it in our bills is because of capacity payments that power producers negotiated into our bills.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#480

Post by Dylan16807 »

ryandrake wrote: post #403
fastball wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think gas stations have an internet connection?

I don’t think they require one to function. Gas stations, including ones where you pay at the pump, functioned fine without Internet before the Internet.

They used to require a phone line. Now they don't, because an internet connection replaced it, with similar reliability.
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